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Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Russian novelist of spiritual depth
posted 8/08/2008 12:56PM
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His first marriage (which had ended with his wife's death) had been an emotional seesaw: "We were unhappy together … but we could not cease to love one another," he wrote. "The more unhappy we were, the more we became attached to each other." His subsequent marriage to Anna proved to be a stabilizing force in his life, and only after marrying her did he produce his greatest works.
Troubled Christian
In his later novels, Christian themes emerge more explicitly, though they are never the only ones.
Crime and Punishment (which he was most of the way through when he wrote The Gambler) is about the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." With rich psychological insight, Dostoyevsky tells the story of Raskolnikov, who murders a greedy old woman and is brought to ruin by the weight of his conscience.
In The Idiot (1868–69) Dostoyevsky presents a man of Christlike goodness in a world of thorny reality. In The Possessed (1872) he critiqued liberalism's skepticism, mockery of traditional values, and neglect of the family.
The Brothers Karamozov (1879–80) was his last and arguably greatest novel. Theological and philosophical themes emerge as he describes the lives of four brothers. The two most memorable are Alyosha, a Christ figure who desperately wants to put Christian love into practice, and Ivan, who angrily defends agnosticism.
In the chapter "Rebellion," Ivan indicts God the Father for creating a world in which children suffer. In "The Grand Inquisitor," Ivan tells the story of Christ's return to earth during the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisitor arrests Christ as "the worst of heretics," because, the Inquisitor explains, the church has rejected Christ, trading away its freedom in Christ for "miracle, mystery, and authority."
Dostoyevsky, the Russian Orthodox believer, made room for a most scathing critique of Christianity. Yet at the same time he affirms it in the character of Alyosha, who believes passionately in Christlike love. In answer to the question "What is Hell?" one of the characters replies, "It is the suffering of being unable to love."
This internal war between the believer and the skeptic waged within Dostoyevsky's soul his entire life, both theologically and morally. One of Tolstoy's friends said, "I cannot consider Dostoyevsky either a good or happy man. He was wicked, envious, vicious, and spent the whole of his life in emotions and irritations.… In Switzerland he treated his servant, in my presence, so abominably that the offended servant cried out, 'I too am a human being!'" The writer Turgeniev once called him "the most evil Christian I have ever met in my life."
In addition, his social and political views were often extreme. He believed that western Europe was about to collapse, and that Russia and the Russian Orthodox Church ("Christ lives in the Orthodox Church alone," he once said) would create the kingdom of God on earth.
His faith, however, seemed deeply devout, if somewhat perplexing in its expression: "If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth," he wrote, "and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth."
In spite of the paradoxes of his life, genius shines through his work, and no other novelist has ever presented characters with such depth and ideas so vital.
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